Riddle of a Violent Century

By Paul Gray

SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron; Random House; 515 pages; $12.95

When The Confessions of Nat Turner was published twelve years ago, William Styron was pilloried by some blacks and liberals. How, their attack ran, dare a white Southerner appropriate the mind and soul of a black slave? Sophie's Choice, Styron's first novel since then, may prompt a similar ambush. What business has an American Wasp writing about the European, chiefly Jewish, victims of the Holocaust? If taken seriously, such questions are dangerous. Areas of the imagination can be fenced off for certain groups alone only at everyone's peril. The question is not whether Styron has a right to use alien experiences but whether his novel proves that he knows what he is writing about.

In this instance, the overriding answer is yes. Sophie's Choice is a sprawling, uneven yet brave attempt to render the unimaginable horror of the Nazi death camps, particularly Auschwitz. This violent century can offer no greater riddle than the existence of such places. They cannot be ignored, but neither can they be considered for too long without jeopardizing sanity. Styron treads a middle course. He keeps the horror at arm's length, in the past and in another country, but offers a heroine-victim who can forget nothing.

The year is 1947, and most Americans cannot yet fully believe what the Nazis did. A young Virginian nicknamed Stingo is in New York, trying to write a first novel. He is callow in the ways of most aspiring authors but feels guilty about living off his small inheritance, since the money can be traced back to a slave sold by his family nearly a century earlier. Stingo takes a room in a Brooklyn boardinghouse and soon be comes involved with two other tenants: Nathan Landau, an American Jew, and Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Gentile who bears on her arm a tattooed number from Auschwitz. Sophie is Nathan's lover, even though he flies into periodic rages and beats her. Stingo falls instantly in love with Sophie and becomes, against his own self-warnings, a "hapless supernumerary in some tortured melodrama."

Using Stingo as his narrator, Styron follows these three characters through a long hot summer. Stingo wrestles with his novel, watches a strange deterioration in his friend Nathan and becomes increasingly the confidant of Sophie. Her tale evolves slowly, hesitantly; she is riven with the guilt of a survivor. There are secrets from her days in Poland and her 20 months in Auschwitz that she cannot bear to think about, much less admit to Stingo.

The gradual unfolding of Sophie's tale is affecting and thoroughly convincing.Styron gives her a core of individuality that elevates her role beyond that of a symbolic victim. True, her suffering has been freighted with irony. Her father and husband, both killed soon after the Germans invaded Poland, were vicious anti-Semites. Sophie admits that she regarded the beleaguered inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto as a buffer that would protect her and her children. She refused to work for the Polish resistance. Her arrest was a matter of blind accident; she was caught smuggling a ham into Warsaw to give to her sick mother. At Auschwitz, she watched her young daughter being taken to the ovens.

As he listens to Sophie, Stingo is forced to consider the abyss that lies between her experiences and his own. He checks back and realizes that on the day she arrived in Auschwitz, he was stuffing himself with bananas in order to make the weight required by Marine recruiters. The disparity of memories appalls him, but he also finds parts of her experience disquietingly familiar. The slavery that was decreed at Auschwitz forces him to think hard about the slavery that existed in the American South. He also perceives in Sophie's Poland an analogy to his own homeland, both vanquished, occupied, committed to a grandeur long since faded. They are both emigres who truly can't go home again.

Nathan, the only member of this triangle who is native to Brooklyn, is curiously unconvincing. Stingo marvels at his ability to foresee such developments as the rise of the Jewish novel and the appearance of nonbreakable phonograph records. Stingo also insists that Nathan is brilliant, a surpassing mimic of the Southern drawl, and a dazzling wit. But Nathan simply does not live up to his billing ("You done knocked up mah precious baby again!" is a stray example of his humor). A character who acts and talks like a turkey is going to be taken for a turkey, no matter how often he is described as a bird of paradise.

The novel's other, though less important flaw is Styron's occasionally overripe prose. He too often lets Stingo pile up adjectives in the manner of Thomas Wolfe: "Brooklyn's greenly beautiful, homely, teeming, begrimed and incomprehensible vastness"; "A pushing and shoving freak show of angular, corpulent, lovely, mottled and undulant human flesh." True, Stingo is pictured as a beginning writer, heavily in debt to Faulkner, Wolfe and the Southern literary tradition, but Styron may preserve more redundant oratory than the effect of Stingo's youth strictly requires.

Sophie's Choice is an impressive achievement all the same, an example of risks taken and largely overcome. To read Sophie's tale is to enter a consciousness of depths and shadings; to share Stingo's response is to participate in an act of conscience.

-- Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Imagine, if you will, a land in which carpetbaggers swarmed not for a decade or so but for millennia and you will come to understand just one aspect of a Poland stomped upon with metronomic tedium and regularity by the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and possessed by even such greedy incubuses as the Turks. Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories. Pride in ancestry and family name, and also, one must remember, in a largely factitious aristocracy, or nobility. In defeat both Poland and the American South bred a frenzied nationalism. Yet, indeed, even leaving aside these most powerful resemblances, which are very real and which find their origin in similar historical fountains (there should be added: an entrenched religious hegemony, authoritarian and puritanical in spirit), one discovers more superficial yet sparkling cultural correspondences: the passion for horseflesh and military titles, domination over women (along with a sulky-sly lechery), a tradition of storytelling, addiction to the blessings of firewater. And being the butt of mean jokes."

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